


choisis l'amour

by teeglow



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: It's mostly quite cuddly, Joe is going through Some Things, Just a lil insomnia as a treat, Post-Canon, Post-Movie, he's just having a horrible think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-07
Updated: 2020-09-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:09:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26331670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teeglow/pseuds/teeglow
Summary: Funny, he thinks, that for all the ways his body has learned to heal over the years, it’s never been able to mend the mind. There, the scars persist.Joe lies awake at night, thinking about Booker's betrayal. He can't seem to make sense of it. And for better or worse, he finds his hurt always leads him back to Nicky and what he'd almost lost.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 8
Kudos: 171





	choisis l'amour

He and Nicky talk a good game, Joe thinks wryly, lying in bed the evening after Booker leaves. Perhaps they had been trying to convince themselves all these years, but it’s not worked. He knows in his gut - still churning as it is - that it’s not worked. He’s staring at the ceiling, Nicolo curled into him, and he knows it’s all one big lie. _Their time, tsk._ There will never be a ' _time’_ when he’s ready for what could have happened this week. He holds his beloved just that little bit closer tonight and hopes he won’t wake.

For his part, he cannot close his eyes. There are images burnt onto his retina and if he tries to sleep, they rush him like a wave. He cannot sleep. 

Funny, he thinks, that for all the ways his body has learned to heal over the years, it’s never been able to mend the mind. There, the scars persist. 

Living as long as they have, of course, only the worst remain. Quynh, for one. Now this. 

Though it is really too soon to say whether this one will last for as long as that. The wound always feels the same when it’s just been inflicted. 

But Joe suspects it will.

Joe cannot imagine a time, for instance, where the image of a gun in Nicky’s mouth won’t haunt him. His sightless eyes gazing at the ceiling, looking past Joe as a pool of blood, thick and sickening, expands beneath his head, soaks into Joe’s knees. 

He reminds himself it was temporary, thank goodness, but another, intrusive part of his brain betrays him, and tells him _So is everything_. As Andy had so horribly reminded them, even immortality was temporary. 

His heart clenches at the thought, his breath seizes briefly in his chest and he pulls Nicky in just that little bit tighter. No, not enough to wake him, but enough to remind Joe that he’s still there, still flesh and blood. They got away with it. No need to panic about what might have been, because they are both here and tomorrow the sun will rise as normal. 

_Well, almost,_ his once-again treacherous mind supplies _. Nearly._ In actual fact, it’ll miss normality by quite a few shades _._ Booker isn’t here and Nile is and - Andromache is mortal. Perhaps normality isn’t something they can count on anymore. 

Perhaps it’s weird that they ever have. 

It’s just - _you get used to it_. You try not to, Joe thinks, but when years pass and missions come and go and the only thing that really changes is the world around you, you can’t help but come to count on those things that have stayed constant. Andy is one of them. They know, deep down, that their lives are finite but Andy is thousands of years old; her touch, her voice, her _caring_ , are just the same as they ever were, despite what she may say. Joe and Nicky have spent far too long alongside her to imagine life without her. It’s like the world has turned to negative space around her, so sure is her place within it. 

And that’s precisely why he thinks they talk a good game. Fate, or time, or any of it; it’s bullshit. Joe wasn’t prepared yesterday to lose any of his friends. Yet, in some way, had lost them all. 

The vision of Keane’s gun going off jolts him again, unbidden. 

_What if Nicky hadn’t come back?_

‘Yusuf.’ The man in question’s quiet voice floats up to him and Joe tucks his chin in to look down at his lover. Nicky’s tired eyes stare up at him in concern and Joe musters a thin smile in an attempt at comfort. It doesn’t work and the sadness in Nicky’s eyes swells visibly. He brings his hand up to rest against Joe’s cheek, and watches as his beloved closes his eyes and leans into it. 

That touch - it is a miracle in itself, one that Joe could never have imagined when he first laid eyes on Nicolo, so long ago and far away he could have dreamt it. Now he finds it it moors him. He sighs.

He misses Booker already. The house feels emptier without him, Andy is lost, and poor Nile doesn’t know what to do with this broken family she’s suddenly a part of. But even as he wishes for the man’s return, the memory of his betrayal stirs again and all Joe can see is Nicky on the floor of a van, Nicky strapped to a table, Nicky staring, unmoving, at a ceiling yet to fall in. The fear breathes life into the dying embers of his fury and it’s all Joe can do to not give into them again. For Nicky and Andy. For Nile. For himself.

Booker had risked it all. Their happiness, their futures, long or short, swapped out for a life of entrapment, a life of torture, every moment they had left together wasted and squandered and lost. Because Booker chose to put his faith and trust in others, and not them. Did he not see how much they loved him? How much they cared? 

And if he couldn’t see that, did he not see how much they loved each other? Wasn’t that enough to stop him from throwing it all away? If not for himself, did he not have it in his heart to give _them_ at least more time? 

Andy could have spent her last years - and Joe hoped in his heart they were many - being used by scientists who cared nothing for the life she had lived and all that she had given for others.

_And Nicky…his Nicolo..._

Joe can’t think of it again. He can’t think about what might have happened. It makes him ill. Joe is no stranger to fear - not so reckless even as old as he is and especially having tied himself to another long ago - but to think of that room and those machines and that _gun-_

A tear slips down his cheek slowly. 

‘I know, my love,’ Nicky says softly, and he catches it with his thumb. He draws himself up to sit better alongside Joe, and lets him turn his head to rest against his collarbone. ‘I know.’ 

The warmth of Nicolo isn’t enough to erase the weight of the last few days, and Joe knows sleep will not be forthcoming for him for hours yet. But the broken part of him settles slowly, not so much loose and rattling, as just waiting to be put back in place. He is so grateful for Nicky, so boundlessly thankful for him, and he reaches out to take his hand in his, because this is how he is, how he longs to be always, in the arms of the man he loves. 

Booker knows nothing of his heart. If he did, Joe thinks sorrowfully, he wouldn’t have done what he did. 

Had their love upset Booker that much? Or had he just not thought enough about the enormity of what he’d be robbing them of? Either thought, it seems, is enough to provoke pain. His and Nicky’s love for each other had never lessened that which they felt for Booker and Andy. It was different, but no less powerful - no less real. 

Neither had it made them immune to grief and the heaviness of the relentless passage of time. Booker was right that they weren’t alone, but as far as Joe was concerned, neither was he. Not for at least a hundred years had he been alone. He and Booker were brothers, weren’t they? But he questions everything now and it only serves to make him angrier still about what Booker so carelessly threw away. 

He snarls quietly in frustration, and Nicky hushes him gently, his embrace a balm to Joe’s restless soul. His mind is going round in circles, trying to make sense of it all. But it always comes back to one thing (and always will); Nicky. 

He wonders if Booker wasn’t wrong after all.

Is it so awful, Joe thinks, to be so long together? To have someone beside you who becomes so deep a part of you, you quite literally cannot remember life before them? 

He and Nicky knew the risk of allowing themselves to become halves of one another, to blur irrevocably the line where one ended and the other began, even if they hadn’t understood it at the beginning. Frankly, by the time they did, it was too late. But to not take it anyway felt needlessly cruel and, more than anything, ungrateful. Mortal men could never know or experience the love they had for each other - how unfair then to throw it away because one day it might hurt. 

Joe cannot bring himself to regret their decision for a moment - if it ever felt like a decision at all. 

Rather, he thinks it has saved him. It will always save him. 

He wishes it could have done the same for Booker. 

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I don't really know what this was, but a splurge of emotions. Joe and Nicky absolutely fascinate me - their love for each other over 900+ years? Invented Romance (probably literally, idk?). We stan.
> 
> Also I expect Joe does feel for Booker too - especially later. After all, watching football together is a very specific act of affection and familiarity (she says with no regret and in all seriousness). Hey, maybe I'll write about that.


End file.
